Diana Krall: carrying the torch for crooners of yore, jazz's beguiling leading lady looks inside and ahead

Interview, August, 2004 by Sam Taylor-Wood

With her smooth, smoky renditions of jazz standards by the likes of Duke Ellington and Irving Berlin, Diana Krall has for years been the unheralded voice of a generation--albeit one that came of age before she was even born. But with her latest album, The Girl in the Other Room (Verve), the Grammy-winning vocalist and pianist opted to sing a different tune--several, in fact, and for the first time some of her own, co-written with husband Elvis Costello. Here, she talks to photographer, filmmaker, and friend Sam Taylor-Wood.

SAM TAYLOR-WOOD: So, Diana, I've just come from visiting the queen of England, and I'm exhausted from the excitement. [laughs]

DIANA KRALL: But it is so exciting. When someone says, "What did you do today?" how often do you get to say, "Oh, I just went to Buckingham Palace to visit the queen?" [both laugh] So did Her Majesty offer you any advice?

STW: No. I was so stupidly nervous. I said, "Hi, I'm Sam!" and she said, "Do you have another name?" and I went, "No, that's my name," and she went, "No, I mean your surname." [laughs] I was like, "Oh, yeah, Taylor-Wood," and then she said, "And why are you here today?" and I said, "Well, "cause you invited me," and she said, "No, what do you do--what have you done?" Then I got shuffled away by a footman.

DK: I can just see you being taken off by a footman, screaming "I take pictures!" [both laugh] STW: It was sort of hard not to blink, like, "This is real. You have made it. You are in Buckingham Palace!"

DK: The closest I've ever come to something like that was going to the White House during the Clinton administration. I was like, "How does a girl from Nanaimo, British Columbia, end up at the White House?" It's a bit overwhelming.

STW: I want to talk to you about your fabulous album, The Girl in the Other Room, which came out in the spring. But one of my questions, actually, has to do with days like the one I had today. Was there a point in your life when you thought, "I've made it! How did I get here?"

DK: It was probably when I met Jeff Hamilton, the drummer I've been working with for the last 20 years. He's the one who brought Ray Brown to hear me sing at a restaurant in my hometown. My dream as a child was to play with a bass player like Ray Brown, who played with the Oscar Peterson Trio. The feeling I had listening to his work was almost carnal, so to actually play for him was earth-shattering for me.

STW: It's amazing when you meet somebody you've grown up admiring and then suddenly you're working alongside them.

DK: You know, we recently played a benefit with my husband, Elvis Costello, and Sir Elton John, who is a mutual friend of ours. Playing with Elvis and Elton and accompanying them with my band was a pretty euphoric experience. [laughs]

STW: I bet! You also collaborated with Elvis on The Girl in the Other Room. It must be amazing to have that intense personal relationship and then be creative with it as well.

DK: It really is. The album is a definite departure. I haven't written original material before, except for one song on my first album [Steppin' Out, 1993], but Elvis and I did six songs together on this one. There were some things that I found I really enjoyed singing about; like, on the title track, there's this film-noir character of a woman who's sort of losing it in a room.

STW: I love that. There's such an enormous emotional depth to the record. Do you find yourself influenced primarily by other musicians of by artists in other disciplines?

DK: So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear. This tune on The Girl in the Other Room, "Narrow Daylight," which Elvis and I wrote together, is like a hymn of strength. But it's also influenced by this photography show that I saw of Richard Avedon's work. It included this series called "Drifters," where he took pictures, just black and whites, of these nameless drifters. I still can't get those images out of my head.

STW: As an artist, you want to open up, but you don't want to be dictatorial so that people come away from your work feeling like there's no room for them to interpret.

DK: You know, I've sung a lot of emotional songs in my life, but when you're writing it yourself, it's very difficult to decide what to reveal. I felt like I was able to express some things with these songs that I wasn't finding in the American popular standard form--you know, personal experiences, engaging in a sort of singer-songwriter confidentiality. But the greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out. You want the listener to find the song on their own. If you give too much away, it takes away from the imagination.

Sam Taylor-Wood has a new show of photographs at New York's Matthew Marks Gallery in September.